Context: I stopped drinking alcohol and coffee 5 months ago.
Even though tea also contains caffeine, you can drink quite a bit of it and not get the same effects as you get with coffee – increased anxiety, jittery hands, overwhelming feeling of tiredness when you're on your way down from a caffeine high, etc.
Coffee is caffeine and tea is caffeine, but one is much more potent than the other. I've never been able to push myself over the edge, even when drinking tea.
Tea, coffee, and chocolate all contain caffeine, with coffee (typically) containing the most caffeine. But variation in caffeine levels isn't the only reason these herbs impact people differently.
In addition to caffeine, all of these herbs contain other stimulant alkaloids, such as theophylline, theobromine, paraxanthine, and others. Levels of these minor alkaloids vary depending on the herb, the variety, and how it was prepared.
But yeah, everyone's body is pretty different, and herbs vary wildly in how they impact people. It's interesting how you can drink quite a bit of tea, whereas I pretty reliably get a headache, start feeling anxious, get crazy palpitations, and have a brutal crash if I have more than a cup a day. Coffee is usually OK up to quite a few cups a day -- there's particular roasts that I handle better than others, and I use reusable K-cups for the consistency.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! Having read up on it, it indeed seems that people's sensitivity to tea vs coffee varies wildly. I just happen to be a person who's more sensitive to coffee (the 2nd cup of the day could result in a crash, anxiety, palpitations, etc.).
This is quite interesting to learn that what coffee contains than other caffeine included ones. I've kind of a feeling that choclate should be the most effective one between those. It helps to release endorphins and stays much longer in digestion than others. I think these could make chocolate the most beneficial one in the long term.
In fact, the French have separate words for the stimulants in coffee and tea: caféine and théine. And if your goal is to describe the "source of stimulation" then this may be more accurate than using the same word for both coffee and tea as the stimulating effects come from a variety of components in coffee and tea (as a sibling comment points out).
Even though tea also contains caffeine, you can drink quite a bit of it and not get the same effects as you get with coffee – increased anxiety, jittery hands, overwhelming feeling of tiredness when you're on your way down from a caffeine high, etc.
Coffee is caffeine and tea is caffeine, but one is much more potent than the other. I've never been able to push myself over the edge, even when drinking tea.